The Paranormalist Series

The Paranormalist series is a work of fiction inspired by real people, places, events, folklore, and paranormal claims. Historical figures, locations, and documented incidents may appear alongside fictional characters, dialogue, interpretations, and events. While extensive research has informed the stories, the series should be regarded as fiction rather than a factual or historical account.

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Draft extract from Strange Phenomena (working title)
Book One of The Paranormalist series

Chapter 1 – The Nazarite

Summer 1957, Warley, West Birmingham

Graham was nearly four years old when he saw Him. The fever that had gripped him for days had yet to break, sending his temperature soaring to over one hundred and three degrees, causing his vision to pulse. Sleep was fitful and disturbing, with dreams of bizarre places and foul monsters that crawled up from cracks and hollows rent deep through the Earth.

It was early morning as he opened his eyes to see his familiar bedroom. Through the summer’s dawn light, he glimpsed a figure sitting at the foot of his bed. Unlike some of his nightmare monsters, it appeared solid and, for the moment, unmoving. From the outline alone, he knew immediately that it wasn’t either of his parents. The figure’s features, ringed in gold and silver light, were instantly recognisable. He’d seen them depicted many times before in books, rendered exquisitely in wood and stone, and as bright, colourful rays struck through lead-lined windows in the Methodist church his mother took him to every Sunday.

With the unexpected adrenaline surge granted him by shock, the weakness in his young body momentarily lapsed. He sat up, disbelieving his eyes to witness the vision of his Lord. The figure was instantly recognisable, bearing the exact likeness of the only picture of Jesus in his mother’s church, the replica of Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World.

“Oh, my God! It’s the Nazarene!” he exclaimed in a high-pitched squeal of amazement.

The figure slowly turned away from overseeing the semi-detached house that Graham’s parents owned, whose garden backed onto Warley Woods, where scouts held their jamborees. His eyes lowered to stare directly at Graham with piercing acuity. The face–His face—Graham immediately corrected himself, glowed with beneficence, projecting an aura of peace and harmony into the otherwise ordinary room. From His mouth, rich tones, the timbre of honey, carried forth.

“It’s the Nazarite, actually,” Jesus admonished him, His voice a condescending mix of mild contempt and weary disdain. With that single statement of supreme importance, He resumed His sentinel watch over the home.

The memory of this event remained with Graham for the rest of his life. He never told his parents. His father would have dismissed it outright; his mother, however, was far less predictable. She would have seized on it all too eagerly. It was the first time he could ever recall hiding something from her.

Later in life, when friends asked him what had occurred immediately after this messianic visitation, all Graham could recall was feeling exhausted, lying back down and falling asleep. Others would have taken the experience as a sign to live a typical Christian life. Maybe, if circumstances in his family life had been less strange, he’d have grown up a church-going man like his friends, with a normal wife, two-point-four standard-issue kids and the typical set of problems confronting a nuclear family in the Midlands in the late 1970s.

Unknown to all, however, Graham’s mother, Eunice, was showing signs of bipolar disorder. Few talked openly about mental illness back then, let alone recognised the symptoms. Even though the term wouldn’t exist for another twenty years, as Graham got older, the diagnoses of Eunice’s condition by a whole slew of doctors ranged from mania and depression to paranoia and melancholia. By the time she had finally been diagnosed correctly and provided with proper treatment, she had been self-medicating with religion for years. Nothing in Graham’s life would ever be normal again.

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Chapter 2 – A Series of Unfortunate Jobs

February 1978, Leyton, East London

Graham was bone-bored, a boredom that had permeated deep into his mind over the last few years since he’d left the polytechnic, suffusing his daily life, infiltrating his every waking thought. This was not how he’d expected his life to be.

On the face of things, he had little to complain about. He had an attractive partner, Sarah, the sister of a friend he’d met while on his polytechnic course, a job that paid well, a decent flat to live in not far from his old student digs, and with no particular worries for his future to concern him. This situation was a country mile from where he’d found himself when his course had come to a somewhat abrupt end just before his twenty-first birthday. Since that time, he’d been forced to scratch a living for himself with little in the way of useful qualifications to draw upon.

His immediate role upon finding himself in need of employment came in the form of a small legal department in Camden. He hadn’t trained in any form of legal profession, nor professed or feigned any interest towards one, but neither had he trained in hiring out telephone answering systems to companies and wealthy individuals. Due to the value of this advanced technology, contracts had to be drawn up with customers. This required a whole new section of the business, formed to facilitate official matters but usually concerned with sending threatening letters for non-payment of debts. The fact that he was working for an effective cartel licensed by the GPO did nothing to quell his disquiet at his position. Day in, day out, the sheer monotony of answering calls, only to repeat the same conditions for hiring – three hundred pounds a year, paid up front, with no cancellation policy – was utterly mind-numbing and simply a waste of his valuable time.

In the two weeks he stuck at the role, the only high point was a brief chat with Olivia Newton-John, a somewhat unknown-to-him Australian singer who had recently represented the United Kingdom at the Eurovision Song Contest. Half of the conversation involved reading the mandated terms and conditions, with him trying to inject some humanity into the words written as if by some Old Testament deity. The venerated call script, softened by handling and boredom, had long since been folded and refolded into ever more elaborate paper aeroplanes. The remainder of their brief exchange he devoted to denouncing the glittering fabrics and vertiginous platform boots of the Norwegian act that had nudged her into third place. Before signing off, he offered what he clearly intended as comfort: his firm conviction that ABBA would, in no time at all, slip quietly into oblivion.

He knew he had to find better employment, but he was at a loss to know what else he could do.  It was whilst munching on a ploughman’s lunch, paid for with vouchers given as a bonus to his employment alongside the measly pay packet secured in his pocket, that a Situations Vacant advert in the Evening Standard caught his eye.

The ad was typically short and stood out from the derivative text of its neighbouring available positions. With each word, his disinterested mind was sucked further in, the promise of the ad sparking an ember of hope within him for a better life. The ad read: Do you wish to travel the world with one of our international troubleshooters? Do you want to close big deals? If so, then call Mr Bond.

That was all he needed to call the number provided. Two days later, he was in a nondescript room with no windows, in the armpit of Stratford, with over a dozen other hopefuls in what he was quickly beginning to realise was a mass interview. Mr Bond was indeed present, explaining to those assembled that he was making a lot of money and they could too.

Graham wasn’t sure what the company was selling, if they were; the tests conducted on the group seemed to be largely psychological in nature, and the whole morning was conducted with undue secrecy. Whilst waiting for them to call him back that evening, a distant thought refused to be quelled. Was this a discreet first interview for one of the intelligence services? Had the named individual of Mr Bond on the advert been a subtle clue as to the nature of the role? What had happened to the notion of having a tap on the shoulder whilst at university – Oxbridge ones only, of course? Had that been a myth?

Soon after, he received a call from Mr Bond to say he’d got the job. His wild thoughts of becoming a spy quickly evaporated when he was told he’d be selling encyclopaedias door-to-door. It didn’t sound like a euphemism for world-class espionage, and it wasn’t. Regardless of his initial disappointment, the role would at least get him out of his lit-less abode in the basement of Answerphone’s Camden offices. Even better was the idea that, despite a slightly smaller wage, he’d be earning a sizeable commission for any sales he made.

Instead of a subterranean existence, now his day involved a late afternoon pickup in Mr Bond’s patched-up Cortina. For miles they drove, with their monosyllabic driver and a bunch of disconsolate student types crammed into the back of the vehicle. Wordlessly, they would be dropped off in towns just outside London, armed only with a heavy stack of promotional materials and their selling nous to see them through. After a week of this, and despite finding he was actually pretty good at direct sales, it was one rainy evening in late September which decided his exit from his new job.

Whilst Mr Bond was perfectly willing to pick him up from his flat, taking him home again after his evening of hard selling was a different matter. As the car had approached the standard drop-off point near Hendon, the heavens had opened, forcing him to attempt to hitch a lift home again amongst the gloom of grey traffic trudging thirteen miles around the North Circular.

With the realisation that he was good at sales, his third job in so many months was as a double-glazing salesman. The ad he’d responded to was for a home improvement company, initially to schedule appointments for their representatives to attend. This quickly morphed into being a junior salesman working one-to-one with a senior. His one stipulation on taking this loftier role was that he’d be picked up and taken home at the end of the day.

The setup was simple enough, as was its aim: to get people who didn’t want to buy windows to part with their money. His mentor in this endeavour was a genius of the human condition, a man by the name of Dennis Dunne. He would drive to areas just outside London where he would drop off his young protégé, then disappear into a nearby café and await the call. The area in question would have been scouted out in advance for the necessary telltale sign of a likely mark, the stain of old windows on the neighbourhood. With their sights set on a target, it was up to Graham to make the first play.

“Good afternoon,” he’d say, after the door was opened by the unsuspecting, and usually retired, denizen of the house. “My name is Graham Phillips, and I’m from the Internal Systems Organisation in Ealing.”

Whilst technically true, Dennis had told him at this stage not to mention windows at all, at least not initially.

“We specialise in homes, and we’re opening a new showroom just down the road, near to the cinema. Maybe you know it?”

The person would always say ‘yes’ as it would be a local landmark.

“What we’re looking for, for this showroom, is a house nearby that we can use as a local example of the type of windows we specialise in that are already installed.”

As he hadn’t mentioned selling anything at this stage, the door was unlikely to be slammed in his face.

“My boss was driving down this road and thought your house would be perfect, even though you don’t have the aluminium-framed windows we’re looking to stock. It’s such an ideal house in a perfect spot that he’s willing to give you a new set of windows for free.”

That would usually pique the unsuspecting homeowner’s attention.

“Now, there’s no need for anyone to actually come into your home to view them, but we would like to put up a small sign outside advertising where people can buy similar ones from. Could he pop in and see you? I’ll be with him, and he can tell you what it’s all about.”

At the thought of being gifted the latest windows, the homeowner would usually readily agree to this proposition. Then, into the sanctuary of the home would step the master salesman, Dennis. After some initial greetings and pleasantries, with carefully tailored compliments and glossy leaflets in hand, Dennis would begin the actual sales pitch.

“Now, before I start, at the end of tonight, after I’ve explained what we are offering, I’ll need a yes or no on whether you want these. Is that ok?”

Again, the unsuspecting homeowner would typically say ‘yes’ as no option was being forcibly taken from them. Graham had been paying close attention to Dennis and his sales techniques, and this was always his opening gambit. Their acceptance of this ploy was something Dennis could throw back at them if things started to slide.

He’d then proceed to show them the details of the windows in full; how good they were, how they looked when installed, how much warmer they were and the amount of roadside noise they blocked out. It didn’t matter if they sent no one around to see the installed windows or the sign, or if the front of the house was kept clean. Dennis made it sound like a privilege.

“These windows are the latest in double-glazing technology and are hermetically sealed.”

Graham always wondered what that meant. Hermetic? What? Do they do occult incantations over them? He’d never asked Dennis for fear of sounding stupid.

“Now, it’s totally free,” Dennis would continue, “and all you have to cover is the cost of the materials. Usually this would cost six thousand pounds, but we’ll offer them to you for their cost price of two thousand.”

This would be the point at which the homeowner would start to pull back, either wanting to discuss it further with their spouse or simply to have more time to consider the offer. This is when Dennis would return to his opening gambit.

“Now, you do remember what we said at the start and that I will need a yes or a no this evening? I am a manager and my time is precious, and we have seen other places nearby, although we’d much rather go with you.”

In the weeks Graham spent working with Dennis, he’d only seen this tactic fail once. He’d have stayed with the job too, as the commission he was earning was sizeable. He received fifteen percent of Dennis’s commission, giving him a weekly wage close to five hundred pounds. It was a fortune; one he tended to spend quickly on alcohol and women; the rest he would squander. The only problem, and much to his dismay, was his conscience. Locking people, particularly pensioners, into finance deals they could ill afford just seemed immoral. It was a feeling like no other he’d ever felt before, and it left him with no alternative.

After quitting his second salesman job, and with little else on offer, he’d headed back with Sarah to his family home in Devon, but that ended up being worse than chancing his luck by staying in London. Six months later, they were back in London with him on the hunt for another job, one which he hoped would give him more job satisfaction.

Unable to afford a flat, he found himself living with Sarah’s family. When first proposed to him, the arrangement had seemed like a good idea. Sarah’s dad worked at Wembley Stadium as one of the head groundsmen, and the offer was for Graham to help with cleaning up. This meant putting seats back after the Friday night dog racing fixture in time for the football on the Saturday. Then he’d be cleaning up after the match or any pop shows that had taken place there at the weekends. The money was good, ten pounds an hour, and his upkeep was cheap, allowing him to save money. The downside was that Sarah’s family was relatively poor.

Their council flat consisted of the downstairs of a two-storey terraced house in a slum area of Willesden, surrounded by squatters. The house comprised two bedrooms, one living room and a kitchen. There was a toilet but no bathroom, requiring the occupants to bathe in a tin bath in front of the fireplace like Albert Steptoe. Worse still, there were now five of them living there. With only two bedrooms, this meant some creative sleeping arrangements were required.

Sarah, her older sister Adele, and their mother slept in the larger of the two bedrooms at the front of the house that barely had enough space for a double bed. Sarah’s father, John, was in a box room at the back of the house, and it was here that Graham also slept. Both of Sarah’s parents were in their sixties, with most of their children much older than either Graham or Sarah. Adele was fifteen years older than her younger sister and had yet to move out of the family home, something about which Graham had suspicions due to her close relationship with her young sister, suspicions that he’d never dared air.

Her father, John, an incomprehensible Welshman, was a chain-smoker who used his cap as an ashtray. He would rise from his bed at the crack of dawn before heading off to work at the stadium around seven in the morning. The rest of the family lived a nocturnal existence, only going to bed when John had finished his breakfast. This was then Graham’s chance to sleep, once Sarah and her mother had shaken out the bedding and liberally doused it with talcum powder. The whole setup reminded Graham of Charlie Bucket’s tiny home in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

After three months living in the cramped environment and sleeping in John’s powdered remains, Graham had to leave. The precursor event to this decision was somewhat his fault. One evening after an early dinner at ten o’clock, Adele had done a tarot reading for herself, deducing, somehow, that her mother would win a large sum on the football pools. It was Graham who had introduced her to the cards in the first place, but, possibly due to their impoverished situation, Adele had latched onto the possibility of much-improved fortunes for the family. This culminated in a heated argument amongst the female members of the family on how they would spend their winnings. This quarrel had widened to include other close-by relatives, including Sarah’s older brother, Duncan, who lived with his young family in a one-bed flat around the corner.

This had been the last straw for Graham, well, that and Sarah had stabbed him in the arm whilst swinging for her brother with a kitchen knife. The decision to leave coincided with the whole area being demolished by the council and Sarah’s family being moved into a proper council house. They had offered for Graham to move with them, but he politely declined. It had been his second experience of family life, and neither, he’d found, had been to his taste. With the money he’d saved, he ended up moving into a flat newly vacated by Tony, another of Sarah’s brothers, and the proximal cause of his relationship. Tony was moving out to take up a place at the Royal College of Art, and he offered Graham first refusal on his flat, possibly through some measure of guilt on his part at Graham’s predicament.

By leveraging his previous experience and having just passed his driving test, his next job came in the form of another sales position for the nondescript-sounding firm of Universal Consumer Products. He’d seen the firm before whilst living in digs as a student, as it was situated in Peel Road, just round the corner from his second year lodgings at North London Polytechnic. It was a job he could do easily; the money was decent, he had his own company car and, for once, nothing about what he did felt like he was conning anyone.

Even though he’d crashed the company car on his first outing with his senior salesman, they hadn’t held that against him. Mort Barrett, a man who was perpetually in and out of a neck collar due to a severe case of Cockney Shoulder, had taken him out to introduce him to various clients. Mort had been in front, racing his new Ford Capri MK2 through the streets of London, whilst he, a newly-minted driver, drove a bright yellow Hillman Avenger. Somehow, he had managed to keep up with the madman in front of him, even after being forced to follow through the notoriously dangerous Marble Arch, weaving through traffic with the extra visibility afforded by the car. It was only after relaxing, the relief at surviving the ordeal, that he’d inadvertently hit a skip on turning back into the company’s front yard at speed.

A year passed by, then another. When the tedium of his current job grew too much to bear, he switched to a sibling company, the equally exciting-sounding Universal Cleaning Products, and continued much in the same vein as before. Time seemed to be accelerating as he moved into his mid-twenties. At one point, he considered asking Sarah to marry him, as that seemed to be what normal people did. He had a steady job and enough money to buy a flat without requiring a mortgage. It would be the sensible thing to do.

He should have been happy, but he wasn’t. He was bored with his meaningless existence, bored with his job, and bored with his partner. It wasn’t just his sex life either; the spark of that had worn off within the first year. Sarah was pretty, and they got on just fine, but she was just too ‘missionary’ for his tastes, and their shared interests were few.

Something needed to change.

It was whilst he was flicking through a large pile of Flying Saucer Review magazines that he decided what he needed to do to add some excitement back into his life. The magazines were from Tony’s large collection that he’d left for him on moving out, and, with little better to do on an evening, he’d started ploughing through them with gusto. He’d done paranormal research before, nothing particularly professional, save for his last year at the polytechnic, the research that had effectively got him kicked out, but he found he missed the unknown. The paranormal had proven itself to be a capricious field of investigation, but, after absorbing much of the material in the UFO reports he kept at the side of his bed, he was sure there was something to the phenomenon, something he was interested in finding out about.

What he wanted was to meet people who investigated UFOs full-time. Judging by the reports he read, there must be many such people in the country, and organisations with resources that could be tapped for his own investigations, maybe the start of a whole new career. That would give him the change he sorely needed in his static life, and, looking at the inner cover of the copy of Flying Saucer Review in his hands, he had the necessary contact information to make it a reality.

With the telephone receiver murmuring its tone into his ear, he dialled the number for BUFORA, the British UFO Research Association. As the phone continued to ring, he imagined what kind of place he was calling. There was probably a switchboard of operators, all professionally sounding, efficiently connecting the myriad callers with a huge field office of investigators like a cross between NASA’s mission control and the FBI. His pulse raced at the possibilities ahead, and then his call was answered.

“Hello,” came the unexpectedly high male voice.

“Hello, is that BUFORA?” Graham asked, suddenly unsure of his actions.

“Oh, yes! Lionel Beer speaking.”

He couldn’t believe his luck; he was speaking directly to the head of BUFORA, the top man at the centre of UFO research across the entire country. The voice, though, on the other end did not match the man he’d pictured.

“My name is Graham Phillips, and I was wondering if I might be able to speak to somebody involved in full-time UFO investigations. I’ve done some research into the paranormal, but I’d like to offer my skills and get involved in UFO investigations, as I think it has some related phenomena.”

“Oh, that is very interesting!” replied Lionel, his voice rising excitedly in pitch. “And you’re interested in contacting an investigator in your area?”

“That’s correct,” replied Graham.

“Now,” said Lionel, sounding like he was putting down a kitchen utensil on a work surface. “Whereabouts in the country do you live?”

“I’m in Leyton, in East London.”

“Hold on a minute. I’ll just look in my files. They’re under my sink, but I’ve just got to get my muffins out of the oven as I think they’re burning.”

“Um, sure,” agreed Graham, his vision of a large and well-funded research organisation evaporating as Lionel Beer attempted to avoid Alfred the Great’s famous culinary mishap.

The receiver hit a kitchen surface with a dull thud. Then came the distinct sound of an oven door being slammed, followed by a tray hitting a table.

“Oh, those have come out just fine,” Lionel continued in invisible admiration of his baking results.

From the earpiece came the sounds of someone sifting through a cupboard, followed by papers being flipped through at speed. It sounded to Graham’s ear like a foley artist making suitable background noises for an unusual episode of The Archers. The muffled sounds of the receiver being picked back up designated the return of the esteemed BUFORA head and expert cake-maker.

“Oh, yes, there’s a very pleasant fellow in Essex called Wayne Ford. Do you have a pen? Right, here is his number.”

Graham quickly jotted the number on a pad in scrawled digits and thanked Lionel for his time. The instant he put the phone down, it rattled noisily in his hand, like an angry wasp trapped in his fist. He flinched at the creatured movement against his palm, with its shrill tone, eyeing the black plastic with suspicion, as if it accused him of having overstepped some invisible boundary. With all the reports he’d read of UFOs, strange alien creatures, and the mysterious Men in Black, his immediate suspicion was that some unseen agency now had him on their radar, and he would be warned away from any further involvement. He took the receiver up from its resting place, bringing it closer to his ear with trepidation and listened as the static within grew louder.

“Hello?” he inquired, half-expecting a veiled warning from beyond, given by a staccato, electronic voice.

“Hi, Gram!” replied his older sister, Paula, after the line finally connected properly. “How’s things?”

“Hi, Po,” he replied, his imagination calming down instantly. “Oh, the usual.” He thought about his conversation with Lionel Beer, looking down at the number he’d written next to the name, Wayne Ford. “But maybe not for long.”

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Unpublished work. © 2026 Yvan Cartwright. All rights reserved. This extract may not be reproduced or distributed without permission.